More about agglutination

After a lot of excited scuffling earlier this year, I confess I'm still no closer to any kind of formal typological assessment of Koa. At base, this comes down to the fact that, despite the fact that I can speak this language with ever-increasing fluency and it feels completely intuitive, I still can't articulate what the particles actually are: that is, how to classify them in any standard system of linguistic description.

If Koa is agglutinative and all these particles are best described as prefixes and suffixes, I thought, there ought to be some kind of template dictating how they combine. I spent a good amount of time diagramming all this out, for verbal forms, at least; it turns out that there is in fact a pretty firm prescriptive ordering of particles/affixes around their predicate. I made charts like this one, showing the 15 slots that verbs apparently admit:

The most complex "word" I've been able to come up with so far is kotapunacusivatesutásiluketu, "the fact that he apparently won't regularly have been able to finish rereading them," containing 12 morphemes (2 predicates and 10 particles):

ko-ta-pu-na-cu-si-va-te-su-tási-luke-tu
NOM-3SG-HEAR-NEG-IRR-ANT-HAB-ABIL-CES-repeat-read-3PL
"the fact that he apparently won't regularly have been able to finish rereading them"

Quite a bit of recursion is possible as well, which means that there's no theoretical limit on the length of a "word": for example kotaiasivamimuminúkutu "the fact that he really used to start putting them to sleep" containing two instances of the inchoative -mi- in different places.

Of course, the fact that there are ordering rules doesn't say anything about typological classification. Catalan and Bulgarian famously have very complex obligatory ordering rules for pronominal clitics, but I've never seen anyone propose that these must therefore combine with their verb into a single "word."

Perhaps these particles could be described as clitics rather than affixes, then? Unfortunately I have too little experience with complex clitic systems to have any intuitive sense, but I do notice that Koa permits pauses for thought between particles in a way that I could produce between verbs and clitic pronouns in e.g. Polish (ja się...staram "I'm...trying"), but absolutely never between verbs and affixes (*co chce-...-my? "what do...we...want?").

Can we just call them particles and be done with it? I have the frustrating sense that that word may be akin to "emphasis" in being a placeholder for actual understanding, and I'm not sure why this is turning out to be so hard for me to think through. As a person who loves to put everything in neat little labeled boxes, it drives me a little crazy...especially since the answer might affect my judgment on how Koa should ideally be written. I'll just have to soldier on as I have been for the moment.

One note: just because absurdly long strings of particles can be well-formed doesn't mean that they're necessarily desirable, clear, or constitute good style. That 12-morpheme word up there might be better expressed in more manageable chunks, something like

koputai ve nacusivatai ve tatesulúketu i tasi
NOM-HEAR-be CP NEG-IRR-ANT-HAB-be CP 3SG-ABIL-CES-read-3PL FIN repeat
"the fact that it's apparently the case that it won't regularly have been the case for him to be able to finish reading them again"

Even that's pretty ungainly. The world of Koa style has clearly only just begun to burst into bloom.